Back in the apartment, between tantrums, they both loved to be held, cuddled, and kissed. Their skin was silky like Jeremy’s bald head when he was born. At night, Betsy and I held each other and it was like the old days but even better.
IX
Once we’d finished with the adoption agency and Oleg, we had a new guide named Sasha, who came recommended by a Winnipegger with Ukrainian connections.
The first time we met him he pulled his blue Ford station wagon right onto the sidewalk in front of our apartment. He was tall and movie-star-handsome, in his mid-forties, with white hair and a soft voice. He’d been a scientist when he bought his American car. Then the Soviet Union collapsed and his monthly salary shrank to eight US dollars. He decided to learn English and become a tour guide. On the back seat of his car was a tattered copy of Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945. Sasha noticed me looking at it. The book was more of a struggle to read in English than he really wanted, he said, and he sold it to me for ten US dollars.
Our first outing with Sasha as guide was to the war museum, which sat in a park under the two-hundred-metre-tall statue of the “mother of the motherland.” Made from titanium and impressively hideous, the statue reminded me of the female monster in Metropolis. In the tunnel that ran underneath it we stared up at sculptures of giant citizens, soldiers, and other heroes conquering the Nazis, while a martial anthem played from hidden speakers. Nobody here could forget the Great Patriotic War just yet, the war that had followed the unmentionable period when the Soviets were Hitler’s allies.
It was as if time stopped when Brezhnev built the museum in 1980; nothing was dated after that year. We walked around the first of the three floors with Sasha and the boys in tow. They were well-behaved at first, but soon got bored and Betsy had to take Peter and Bohdan aside to tell them not to run around, touch things, or yell. I asked Sasha to translate signs on display cases for me, all of which were in Russian only. The pictures of trenches and tanks straddling the flood plain of Kyiv seemed bizarre, as if I were looking at battlements outside Winnipeg.
In one of the Holocaust exhibits a group of American teenagers stared mesmerized at a film of the Babi Yar atrocity: naked bodies fell into a ravine, while menacing dogs and German soldiers stood at the edge. In the next room we saw a glove made of human skin from a concentration camp. Betsy took the boys outside to wait, while Sasha leaned against me and spoke in a confidential murmur.
“Many times, the Red Army got to the concentration camps before the Allies. They had the first chance to count victims. And in their arrogance, you know, they exaggerated. Not so many Jews died really. So you must think of this when you hear talk about six million dead.” I said nothing, but it reminded me of my Mennonite relatives, their deeply ingrained anti-Semitism.
The next morning I asked Sasha to take us to Babi Yar. There was little to see at the official Soviet monument built in 1976. The inscription did not mention the 34,000 Jews shot near here on September 29 and 30, 1941, by Germans and their Ukrainian collaborators; instead there was just a mechanical tribute to the Soviet “victims of fascism.” The ravine slope here was not steep at the edge. Sasha didn’t say so, but I knew from my reading that the real killing field was over a kilometre away, where the ravine does have the steep slopes on which you could easily imagine naked people forced down and shot by machine guns, then covered up by the next set of victims, in continuous layers of flesh and dirt.
Peter and Bohdan were happy to be outside, something rare for them in the orphanage, and they kept getting down on their knees and playing in the mud and grass. I tried to make them stand up, pointing at the mud on their pants. Betsy dusted them off, cheerful, then held their hands, swinging them on either side of her. The monuments meant nothing to them and we did not have Sasha try to explain.
The next day we went to the Kyiv zoo. Peter and Bohdan had hardly ever been off the grounds of their orphanages, and never for the purpose of fun, so they bounced in eye-popping excitement with us struggling to hold them back from jumping into bear pits and lion cages. We saw yaks, ponies, bison, geese, Chinese ducks, snakes, fish, monkeys, tigers, crocodiles, lizards — all in enclosures and cages laid out in an enormous, elaborately landscaped area. The Soviets had spent money on this place.
Sasha pointed out an amorous bear couple, rolling on their backs while they touched each other. “They make fore-wedding play,” he said, “they have no sextual addeection.” The unaddicted bears reminded him of the departure of his “beautiful wife” for America. He lowered his voice and confided to Betsy that “I had eight videotapes of pornography, and she find them before she leave.” Sasha enjoyed talking about his messy love life.
During the day I used a calling card to telephone my father in Edmonton. I wanted him to look at a map for me, since I wasn’t certain of our route for the next day. For once I had simple, practical questions. He was helpful, cheerful, enthusiastic. He asked me about the boys and I said they were exhausting but worth all the effort.
At dinnertime on April 8 Betsy and I boarded the train with Peter, Bohdan, and Sasha to see my father’s village. It took ten hours from Kyiv to Zaporozhye, 600 kilometres to the southeast. The trip was awful. The train shook violently on corners, like a big dog after a bath, so Betsy and I had to hold the boys when they went to the toilet, trying to keep them from dropping in. They put their hands into everything, and their pants dragged all over the urine-soaked floor. We scrubbed them off as well as we could and hoped the orphanage had inured them to bacteria.
We had booked a sleeping compartment with four beds and when we put the boys into their new Zellers pajamas, they cried so loudly that we got a visit from a drunk in the next compartment. The shirtless man pulled open our door, fingered his belt and shouted unintelligibly, louder than Peter and Bohdan. He smelled of beer and sweat. We got Sasha, who tried calming him. Sasha claimed the man spoke in German. To me it sounded threatening and Slavic.
After the boys fell asleep, I bought a lukewarm Lvivske beer and talked to Sasha outside our sleeping compartment. Parenthood had been stressful and I looked forward to uninterrupted adult conversation. Sasha said he’d just read “this small book, maybe anti-Semitic a little bit,” about how eighty percent of the Soviet government under Stalin had been Jewish, and how a czarist official was shot by a Jew in the Kyiv opera house, and that was what started the whole Bolshevik revolution.
My older Mennonite uncles and aunts had similar conspiracy theories. Even Lil observed that Hitler did some good things too, like making the trains run on time. Rather than remind her where those trains went, I just changed the subject.
Now Sasha pointed out that no Jews died in the September 11 attacks. That was because, he said, Israeli Mossad operatives warned them ahead of time. Osama bin Laden was a high-level agent run by Mossad in cooperation with the CIA.
I told him this was ridiculous anti-Semitic slander spread on the Internet. Many Jews died in the 9/11 attacks.
“The media,” he said, “about fifty American and non-American Jews, they deciding what is on the news.” So much for adult conversation. I excused myself and went to bed.
The next morning we stumbled off the train at 5:30 am in Zaporozhye. All around us people marched like grim insects, silently, sometimes giving one of us a helpful push. Cars parked around us on the sidewalk as if we weren’t really there. Sasha secured a taxi after some intense negotiating.
We drove down Lenin Avenue, the longest street in Europe according to our driver. At the western end we saw a statue of the great man pointing to the dam that thousands of construction workers lost their lives building. The city is named for the rapids that power the massive dam. Zaporozhye’s concrete apartment blocks looked almost like pictures of Sarajevo under siege: broken windows, abandoned cars, graffiti, everything except bullet holes. Zaporozhye seemed like a good place for executions.
Our first stop before we left the city was a twenty-four-hour grocery where we bought gifts for people in the village.
I walked with Sasha into the store past an armed guard and a sullen cashier. Sasha was a committed teetotaler and suggested not buying vodka or other alcohol, which was my first choice. I was tired enough to take this advice and considered chocolates and candies. “If you feel very close, zat somevun is soulmate, you can always give money,” said Sasha. I walked to the cashier with the gaudily wrapped packages, feeling certain booze would have made the better choice.
After passing many seedy apartment blocks and industrial scrap heaps, the cab driver took us on a four-lane highway out of town. For about half an hour the boys stayed quiet and Betsy and I just watched the scenery. Beyond the city you could see the green advance of spring.
Our driver recommended a detour to see a former Mennonite village other than Dad’s. It was still only 7:00 am and we agreed. A little ways off the road was a broken-down brick building that had probably been a granary. A few scruffy dogs scratched themselves as if they were on Prozac and barking would be too much trouble. Betsy got out of the car briefly to take a picture, and we saw one perfectly preserved brick building with a chimney of elaborate masonry. Just outside the village we reached our destination: a flat stone monument to some Mennonite victims of the anarchist Makhno back in the 1920s. It had been recently placed by Canadians and engraved in Ukrainian and German with the names of the dead.
Bohdan had become whiny by the time we arrived at the monument. He ate part of an apple while making a hee-haw sound like a donkey with a sinus condition. After Betsy did her best to take a picture of the monument, which was too big to fit inside the viewfinder, she went over to Bohdan to pick up the pieces of apple he dropped on the ground in the tall grass. Then she tried picking him up. I was with Sasha, struggling with the German inscription on the monument, while he translated the Ukrainian for me. I heard Betsy make a whoofing sound like air escaping suddenly from a tire. Bohdan had kicked her in the lower chest, on the camera, which hung from her neck. She removed it from the case and tried advancing the film. Nothing. She tried taking a picture. Nothing.
For the first time Bohdan did not look cute and adorable to me. I wanted to smack him.
“Maybe Bohdan is filled with the spirit of the bandit Makhno,” I said to Sasha, who did not laugh. Betsy did laugh, but we both knew the day had just gotten a lot longer.
We drove back to Zaporozhye. I didn’t want to have come all this way only to leave without any visual record of the visit. Bohdan was crying and Sasha couldn’t make him say why. We needed to be out of the car for a while. Since leaving the orphanage Bohdan had discovered a whole new emotional range, like someone who finds a pipe organ after only having a tin can with a stick. We didn’t understand yet why he played the organ or how to make him stop.
Back on Lenin Avenue our driver took us to a mall with a buffet restaurant and a store that sold cameras and electronics. I changed US traveller’s cheques into local currency. Transliterating my name into Ukrainian from my passport took them only about five minutes here and the whole process a relatively efficient half hour. During this time Bohdan kept lying down on the mall floor and refusing to get up, though he was quiet now. He was extremely tired, and it was only 8:30 am.
Betsy and Sasha and Peter had discovered that fresh batteries would not make the old camera go. Betsy bought a new one, an analog Olympus with a zoom lens. Within minutes I’d dropped it on the asphalt outside. But it still worked.
Back in the car Peter sat between me and Betsy when he wasn’t trying to jump into the front seat, where Sasha spoke Russian to the taxi driver in a sleep-inducing murmur. Periodically Bohdan shrieked from the floor and again we had no idea why.
After thirty minutes that had felt like ninety we saw the sign for Nikolaipol. The houses were painted in fading pastels, many of them sagging from gravity’s pull. Weird piles of straw and rotting lumber, twisted metal, and abandoned machines filled the yards. Old women bent over double with handleless brooms, dressed in rags and rubber boots. The road was gutted with deep potholes. There was only one new house under construction. The few houses that weren’t crumbling victims of entropy stood in their solid brick with ornamental embellishments, built by Mennonites more than a century before their final exit; I recognized them from photographs in books about the area.
Upon Ukrainian independence the village was renamed Mikolaipol, the n changing to m in the transformation to Ukrainian. My aunt Lil still said Nikolaipol, the Russian version. Even though this region was Russian-speaking, the country had trouble with Ukrainian and Russian bilingualism. There was too much blood in the topsoil to imagine that two things could be true, or that a place could have two names. Lil couldn’t imagine it either; she said Ukrainian was not really a language, just a form of Russian slang.
And another language lurked in the background here. The village had originally been named Nikolaifeld in German, after Czar Nicholas and one of those fields with six feet of rich topsoil. My Mennonite ancestors did the naming and also the farming, starting around 1800. They came from East Prussia, invited with thousands of others by the German-speaking Catherine the Great, who wanted to settle the Ukrainian steppes with experienced farmers: Lutherans, Catholics, Mennonites, and Jews.
Mennonites were allowed their own schools and were exempt from military service, as they wished, for a while. All they had to do was prosper, which they did, even as their privileges gradually eroded. But authority kept breaking down: the communist revolution, the vicious civil war of the 1920s, the Holodomor or Great Famine perpetrated by the Soviets on Ukrainian peasants in the early 1930s, and then various terror campaigns that culminated in world history’s most murderous industrial restructuring, Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture. World War II brought Mennonite life in Ukraine to an end. In 1943, 12,000 Mennonites fled Soviet Ukraine, many of them following the 21,000 who had already immigrated to Canada in the 1920s.
Looking out the taxi window the view resembled pictures I’d seen of small Mennonite villages in western Canada or Nebraska, the layout on a single street with the church, now converted into a granary, the most prominent building, a blacksmith’s shop at the other end of the road. A rural Mennonite from a different century would instantly find his bearings here, and the place had a dream-like familiarity for me.
I was holding a photograph of the house taken by my aunt Lil when she visited here in the summer of 1983. In Lil’s photo, apple trees bloomed in front of a white brick wall, hiding most of the structure. But I could see the decorative brickwork at one corner of the house’s roofline, and it was like a puzzle piece that we tried matching with every brick house in the village. With the kids almost rioting in the cab we crawled in first gear through the single street, staring at every building.
By the time we reached the end of the village road, we still had not found the house in Lil’s picture. We turned around and I was beginning to lose heart as we drove back at the same slow pace. Then, just off a T intersection Betsy saw an old brick column built around an electrical transformer. Lil had described just such a column “on the village road,” now a muddy footpath. Diagonally across the street was the white house with the apple trees and brick trim. This was my grandfather’s house, the place my father was born just before everything went to hell.
We got out of the car and Sasha introduced us to the current owners of the house, Vera and Ivan, in the driveway. They looked like aging potatoes that had squished sideways with the steady pressure of time. Their teeth stuck out at odd angles and their clothes were dirty. Vera talked about her grandson, who raised rabbits next door for their pelts and meat. He kept bees as well. Meanwhile, Peter climbed the fence, almost toppling the rotten wooden posts. When I explained that my father was born in their house, Vera and Ivan invited us to come in.
In the narrow kitchen, Vera served us milk curds with sugar, a thick and lumpy mixture that the boys loved and Betsy and I had trouble swallowing. Vera and Ivan said the house was ruined in the 1940s by collective farm workers and then rebuilt in the ‘50s. They
told us they farmed beets and grain. We gave them the chocolates and candies I’d bought in Zaporozhye. They were indifferent and showed no reaction to my suggestion that their grandchildren might like the candies. I should have bought the vodka.
They offered to show me their house, and I nodded. Betsy, knowing how much this meant to me, said, “You go. We’ll stay here and finish our milk.”
The tiny house was laid out exactly as Lil had described back in Winnipeg, two bare bedrooms off the living room in front, the kitchen at the back. The living room was the last room they showed me, where my grandfather was arrested in the middle of a winter night in 1937, as the Black Maria waited outside. Harsh sunlight coming through the small, uncurtained windows illuminated how poor life had become for these farmers: no musical instruments leaned against the walls or rested on the worn furniture, no books sat on any surface. Throughout the entire tour, Sasha had kept up a running commentary in English, about his ruined marriage and ramshackle life. I had no chance to ask questions or even process what I was seeing.
Every detail in the house disappointed me, even the ones that I could have predicted, like the icon hung above the stove, so thoroughly un-Mennonite with its bloody Christ on a porcelain cross. Less predictable was Ivan’s filthy white sweatshirt that said Powder Puff Cheerleaders. The boys kept calling from the kitchen and I could hear Betsy telling them not to touch the stove, not to spill their milk. Sasha talked and talked. I had expected to sit in reverent silence and weep in distress or bitterness. Instead I felt only irritated and tired, tired in my muscles and bones.
As we walked outside I noticed that there were fewer apple trees in front than in Lil’s pictures. Sasha took photos with us in front of the house and at the side. Vera and Ivan played along with us funny tourists, posing for pictures, exclaiming in reluctance and amusement at the notion that they should have their pictures taken. Ivan smiled and threw out his hulking stomach. Vera smiled too, something my family did not ever do in the few surviving photographs from this place.
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